This is an opinion column.

I’m not one to hold on to regret. We are the aggregate of our experiences, after all, the sum of our scars. We humans tend to do dumb things, mean things, self-destructive things. We suffer enough from the stumbles, with any luck, to learn how to watch our steps.

It’s how we learn who we are, and who we want to be.

This is not a comment on Alabama football, by the way. Or Auburn football, or football at all, in this moment when there is no joy in Mudville. I was thinking of less significant regrets than the state of Alabama’s defense.

I regret the blind leap the world has taken to embrace artificial intelligence, even after watching “2001: A Space Odyssey.” What the HAL could go wrong?

I regret that on the watch of my generation in the news business, government at all levels has become less transparent, more filtered, and less committed to the notion that the inner workings of public business are the business of the public. I regret that most people don’t care about that, and I take my share of the blame.

I regret some of the words I’ve used, and many more that I didn’t. I regret stories I never got to.

I regret that the tone of news on the internet is different than it was in print, that the web has trained our brains to ignore things that are important to everyday life and good mental health.

I don’t think we as a world fully understand what happens to our brains when we stop seeing that normal, boring stuff happens all that time, like zoning meetings and tax policy and library board meetings where they talk of budgets and library business without outrage from the easily outraged. Newspapers, bless them, provided both the boring and the bombshells. On the web everything is a war and indignation, and it fuels the movement to destroy all our institutions.

I regret that the 24-hour news cycle bombards us with more disturbing thoughts than any healthy human can take, so many people just turn away.

I regret that as a society we have come to measure success with dollar signs, that history and art and reading and writing are dismissed as unprofitable, while winning means everything and greed is hyped as a virtue.

But I am – as I claimed at the start – not one to hold on to regret. Particularly those about outcomes or results or forces beyond our control. Perhaps that’s because I grew up in Alabama reading the fictional Atticus Finch talk of trying to do right, even when there’s no way to win.

Or perhaps it is because I have known a few Atticus Finches in real life, in my family and in journalism and in the world, who practiced that standard even if they did not flaunt it.

When I imagine Atticus Finch the image of Gregory Peck does not come to mind. When I think of Atticus I see Wayne Flynt, and not just because he knew Harper Lee and wrote beautifully of his time with her.

He is a professor without pretense, a preacher who isn’t preachy, a historian and writer who has told Alabama’s story without flinching, with pain and with a love that demands honesty.

I have, over the course of time, held on to words Wayne Flynt said or wrote in moments I needed to hear them. These are some of the things he said:

On worrying about the re-emergence of angry and racist rhetoric:

That part of me who is a social/political historian recalls what I learned long, long ago. You can tell when you are winning when the reaction of those who disagree with you becomes decreasingly calm and rational and increasingly shrill and frantic, as they do when the old ways of “wisdom” they learned long ago seem hopelessly flawed and constantly shrinking into a smaller and smaller space, and when my reaction to them is more pity than anger That is when I stop worrying so much.

On difficult times and difficult places (after a conversation about my own father)

My mantra for the times is things could go well and they could go badly. But name any time in history when that wasn’t true. So, we are people of the darkness or of the light. Therefore the verdict of history will not be the outcome but the income. What did we do faithfully to be people of the light, the kind of person your father was, not because he could have played a larger role to accelerate historical change that would come anyway, but because he ministered to the pain of inevitable change so as to bring as many people as he could into the light at whatever speed they could manage.

On how Alabama’s future – slow-moving as it might be – depends entirely on the courage and tenacity of good people:

Sometimes I conclude we have at last turned a corner, only to see more of the same lack of vision and courage on the next corner. But my theology was to fight all the battles as skillfully as I can and not lose all my influence for any change by expecting too much. We have gotten better as a state. But the age of Mastodons seemed sometimes to change faster than Alabama.

On the dangers of using fear as a political tool:

One great theologian wrote that “The greatest of all infidelity is fear lest the truth be bad.” That fits the mood of our time and will do to modern Christian conservatism what the “witch-trials” did to religion in colonial America.

On the power of stories, and the shared experience of “love and exasperation.”

In some way or other, every book I have written has a backstory of my love and exasperation for and with Alabama and the South. And what gave life and conviction to the so-called “Southern Literary Renaissance” (Faulkner, Welty, et al.), arguably the most powerful outpouring of American literary energy and creativity in the mid 20th Century, was born as much in journalism as in creative writing.

On discrimination against an immigrant that echoed the sins of our past:

It just simply breaks my heart that our past has so tainted our present and our future. But … we must soldier on, hoping that the next generation will be better than ours has been, and doing what little we can to make that a reality.

Every time I hear the words of Wayne Flynt, my Atticus, I forget about my regrets.

There is no time for them.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner.